Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Valerie Traub

ribbons and laces that served as clothing fasteners, and “throwing the stocking,” or relieving them of their hose.²⁷ As David Cressy notes, these actions were meant both “to help them to their happiness, and to help establish plausible evidence of their consummation.”²⁸ The public theater likewise promoted its own discourse of sex, in no small part through stage comedy’s focus on physicality, bodily senses, domestic scenarios, and, more often than not, erotic desire. A traditional comedic plot device, the bed-trick, makes comic hay out of sexual knowledge relations. Temporarily inverting the usual patriarchal hierarchy in order to reintegrate the recalcitrant man into the reproductive community, the conventional Renaissance bed-trick dramatizes male ignorance about particular female bodies while asserting female knowingness over the duped male. The Antipodes trumps this convention by exploiting Peregrine’s delusion and making Martha pose as his sexual fantasy, the Antipodean queen. Depending less on male ignorance and female duplicity than the collusion of an entire community, the bed-trick in Brome’s play functions like the ritual festivities of the wedding night, forging ties of communal sexual knowledge through the approbation of marital consummation.

      Within the play’s context of marital dis-ease, theatrical sex therapy, publicity about sex, and communal investment in it, it is striking that Martha’s narration of her prior homoerotic encounter with the “wanton mayd” elicits no overt condemnation—indeed, it seems to exist in some field of discretion untouched by moral, medical, religious, or legal judgment. We would err in judging the application of this discretion to be a form of tolerance, for tolerance assumes recognition of the object of forbearance—precisely what is lacking here. Nor is such discretion explained by other conceptual safety nets that might seem to minimize the threat of female-female sex: that Martha’s sexual experience is presented in the past tense; that she now is safely married. After all, she has just asked Barbara to repeat, if in a more pedagogical guise, the bedroom performance of the “wanton mayd,” and it is the miserable state of her marriage that has led her to look outside it for erotic instruction. We need only imagine the direction the plot might have taken if, in the adulterous mode of Restoration comedy, Barbara had capitalized on maximizing her own erotic pleasure and, in response to Martha’s plea, bedded down with Peregrine, or Martha, or with both of them; the fact that the play entertains no such possibility for comic entanglement confronts us with the particular indifference with which Martha’s reminiscence is met.

      I am not suggesting that a patriarchal teleology or heterosexual privilege fail to organize the logic of Martha’s situation: Martha’s naïveté expresses an altogether conventional form of early modern femininity; her friend’s embraces are positioned narratively as a precursor to marital intercourse; and her request for Barbara’s tutelage likewise has the restoration of procreative sexuality as its end. Nonetheless, Martha’s predicament forces us to acknowledge a decided disjunct between marriage and sex. Of what does Martha’s marriage of three years consist? Whatever it is, it is not sex: and this absence of joy, of jouissance, is quite literally driving her mad. Even though Brome’s play craftily brings about a three-years-delayed consummation to great communal fanfare and tendentiously maps erotic jouissance onto a reproductive imperative, the fact remains that Martha’s journey to erotic satisfaction can hardly be called straight. And having turned to her friend Barbara for erotic instruction once, it is certainly conceivable, if we permit ourselves the intellectual indulgence of thinking outside the plot, that she might do so again. That, at least, is a conceit made possible by Martha’s erotic remembrance, embedded as it is in a scene of erotic yearning—a yearning simultaneously for knowledge and sex—that the play both gestures toward and disavows.

      “What Must I Then Ha’ Done, or … What Has Your Husband Done to You?”

      By raising marital sexuality to the status of a question and by posing that question by means of female-female eroticism, Brome’s representation of the state of Martha’s knowledge urges us to reconsider the state of our knowledge about early modern sex: not only what we know, but also how we know it. I thus turn away from the possible pleasures we might infer from Martha’s fictional biography to pursue instead the knowledge relations that the representation of her ignorance performs. Within this inquiry, Martha functions less as a character or a subject—indeed, her flat characterization all but precludes that—than as a heuristic for accessing strategies of knowledge production. To treat her in this way no doubt accords to Brome’s play more intellectual heft than it deserves. Nonetheless, this strategy propels analysis further than does simply rehearsing the terms of early modern patriarchy or, alternatively, fantasizing a queer erotic elsewhere for women beyond patriarchy’s frame.

      To begin, then, with the current state of historical knowledge. If, as I’ve begun to intimate, the historiography of sexuality fails to do justice to Martha’s situation, so too does the work of most feminist and social historians. Taking gender as its primary term of analysis, for instance, feminist scholars have tended to focus on sexuality as it pertains to women’s so-called “life cycle” as maid, wife, mother, or widow.²⁹ The patriarchal “life cycle” likewise informs the work of most social historians, whose studies of marriage, gender identity, and social transitions generally are organized along the lines of wooing, wedding, birth, and maternity.³⁰ Were they to read The Antipodes, such scholars would likely emphasize Martha’s obsession with child-getting, thereby implicitly privileging a reproductive imperative over sexual pleasure. Those scholars of sexuality who attempt to work outside the logic of the female reproductive life cycle tend to do so by deploying categories of deviance or transgression: premarital sex, bastardy, adultery, prostitution.³¹ Whether the critical accent is on the disciplining of women’s bodies or opportunities for female agency, transgression has functioned heretofore as the primary analytical means for conceptualizing erotic conduct that fails to conform to patriarchal mandates. Yet, because notions of norms and their transgression are structured by a binary of the licit and the illicit, they necessarily are indexed to the dominant social orthodoxy—even when the intention is to uncover the existence of those who would defy it.

      But what of Martha’s memory of kissing and clipping? Some forms of female eroticism are neither subsumed under marital exigencies nor performed in defiance of them; not primarily organized by the neat logic of a life cycle lived in compliance with patriarchal ideology or its transgression, they cannot adequately be comprehended within the licit/illicit divide.³² Thus, simply adding female homoeroticism to a list of deviant acts or identities would fail to account for Martha’s desire for marital sexuality and procreation alongside her experience of sex with a woman. Nor does this divide help us to map the complex relations inscribed in Martha’s sexual history: casual sex with an unnamed woman; marriage utterly devoid of sex; request to a female acquaintance for erotic instruction; marital consummation with an unfaithful husband. Much less does it account for the erotic improvisation of Martha’s anonymous bedmate, who passionately embraced and slapped her companion while expressing her own desire to conceive a child. Was she as ignorant about the means of procreation as Martha? How are we to understand the maid’s desire to be impregnated by Martha and Martha’s desire to learn how to conceive by having sex with Barbara? How do we account for the queer circuit whereby these characters’ desires, frustrations, and hopes are represented?

      The representation of Martha’s sexual history urges a recognition that none of the bicameral rubrics through which we routinely process early modern sex—the licit and the illicit, the homo and the hetero, the queer and the normative, erotic acts and erotic identities—provide us with much analytical purchase on the sexual and knowledge relations enacted in this play. Let us ask, then: What are the historical conditions of the production of erotic knowledge in the early modern period? To date, the most analytically generative method for approaching this question has been Michel Foucault’s distinction between “two great procedures for producing the truth of sex”: an ars erotica, supposedly pursued by premodern and non-Western cultures through practices of initiation, secrecy, and mastery; and a scientia sexualis, the distinctively modern, Western disciplinary apparatus, based on confession, which elicits and produces knowledge of sexuality in order to administrate it.³³ Yet, despite the therapeutic intent of Brome’s play, Martha’s homoerotic experience is not subject to any particular procedure for producing truth. Her request for erotic initiation, after all, is